The painting is an allegory of the penalties of profane love - in those days syphilis. The stigmata of syphilis are all there (Cupid's broken arrow, a honeycomb and scorpion's tail) but one of Baum's students noticed something others had not. A cherub on the right, holding a bunch of roses, is standing on a bed of thorns. One of them has penetrated his foot and you can just see blood, yet he is smiling beatifically. That must mean his foot is numb, and that he is suffering a condition called tabes dorsalis - a symptom of syphilis.

Piero di Cosimo, A Satyr Mourning over a Nymph (about 1495)

The painting of a beautiful dead nymph has long been thought to be based on the death of Procris in Ovid's poem Metamorphoses. But Baum's student believes this is wrong. Di Cosimo must have studied a real recently murdered woman. There are lacerations on her fingers and forearm, the classic signs of a knife attack. The mortal wound is in her neck to the left of the trachea, between the C5 and C6 vertebrae. Her left arm is in the characteristic position of being paralysed. She had obviously been the victim of a frenzied knife attack - nothing like Ovid's poem.